Tagged: ‘ginger’

This cheesecake is as close to divine as food gets. It is a uber creamy standard cheesecake with lots of sweet-hot candied ginger and a hint of ground ginger in the cake, and a gingersnap cookie crust. It is a perfect Easter dessert. Make the day before, as the cake needs to chill overnight in the refrigerator to develop the proper texture. Beware. This is truly addictive and everyone’s favorite.

The flavors of gingerbread are a veritable artist’s palate of tastes with white and dark chocolate, coffee, caramel, coconut, all manner of stone fruits (especially pears, apricots, and apples), lemon, orange, dairy, raisins, dried fruit, winter squash, berries (especially raspberries, which make a smashing side sauce to drizzle over gingerbread), and warm spirits such as rum and sherry. Its almost infinite in culinary terms.

Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie. A tradition. I used to think heavy cream too rich an addition to the custard, having grown up on using the old Libby’s recipe calling for evaporated milk, but the cream stabilizes the custard perfectly for…

I adore fresh pears. Next to apples, oranges, and bananas, pears are the most common winter fruit. A delicate fruit with a short harvest period, we can enjoy fresh pears from Washington and Oregon all winter due to the convenience of cold storage that slows the delicate off-the-tree ripening process. Pears are easily eaten out of hand, sliced in fruit salads, or paired fresh with cheese for dessert, but the baked desserts they make are positively ethereal, even a bit exotic.

Indonesia is the land of spices and herbs. This was the main reason the Dutch, Arab, Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, and British wanted to colonize Indonesia. This also meant that while they were there, they all have influenced Indonesian cuisine a lot as well in reverse cross pollination. The Dutch wanted a monopoly on the spice trade and conquered Indonesia for more than 300 years, exporting nutmeg, cloves, mace, ginger, and black pepper back to Europe.

It’s September and still hot as blazes. While we often think of the slow cooker for those long cooked winter stews, the slow cooker is the premier tool for summer cooking as well. Think of turkey breast, pork roasts, even lamb shanks.

It used to be a seasonal thing, being crazy for cranberries. Not any more. But there is no Thanksgiving holiday table without cranberry sauce. And I am not alone considering how many cooks love to make a batch of their own cranberry sauce for the holiday table. The array of flavors is close to infinite considering cranberries meld with so many other flavors from curry to ginger.

Cranberries and blueberries come from the same botanical family as rhododendrons and heathers. They are native to the bogs of New England, but great fruit comes from Oregon and Washington, all grown organically. Fresh cranberries arrive in stores in late fall and can be frozen in their original wrapping (don’t put frozen cranberries in the bread machine; defrost first) for use in the spring and summer. Use bags of fresh cranberries within two weeks of purchase so that they won’t get mushy or shriveled. My mother got this recipe from her antique dealer, Alan, who is a genius in the kitchen. For so few ingredients, the results are tart and satisfying with all sorts of roasted meats like poultry, pork loin, and ham. This method of preparing cranberry sauce with the ginger juice fast became a yearly ritual at Thanksgiving and Christmas in my family.

Sauerkraut and its relative kimchi have become popular again with the back-to-the-kitchen movement of fermented homemade foods that are so healthy. Kimchi is a Korean dish of marinated vegetables, most commonly thought of as a pickle condiment, but it is far more versatile a food.